


Castaway (Reprise)

by pocketsizedquasar



Category: Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 19:17:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20569517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketsizedquasar/pseuds/pocketsizedquasar
Summary: the story of a boy, a coffin, and a ghost.an alternate ending in which pip, instead, survives the wreck and floats to safety on queequeg's coffin.





	Castaway (Reprise)

i.

they once called me pip, i think. 

my memory’s all fuzzy from before—before. i remember. i remember a whale. a storm. a coffin. i remember a man with skin like paper and a laugh like a death toll and i remember—i don’t remember his face but i remember his words. his voice. stick to the boat, the paper-man said. 

stick to the boat. 

when they found me i couldn’t breathe. there was the boat and then there it wasn’t and there was nothing to stick to nothing to hold on to but i remember a coffin and i remember a storm and a whale and clinging to the coffin because stick to the boat, because at least that was something, at least it was part of the boat part of the dying. 

i remember dying. a long time ago, before—before. maybe that’s the only thing i really remember. stick to the boat, pip, or by the lord, i won't pick you up if you jump. we can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you. but i jumped anyway; i jumped and i drowned and i came back something else. whatever it was that drowned they used to call pip and they still called me pip afterwards, but really pip died then, pip has died a thousand times by now, died a coward’s death over and over and the only funeral he ever got was the grating of that paper-man’s death march voice. 

i didn’t die this time, though. not now. 

i know very well what dying feels like. 

this was something else. 

ii.

there were good things, too, before. i remember music—my music, pip’s music—i remember lamplight and a storyteller with sad eyes, his harpooner with his soft voice, the first mate with that quiet observance. i played music for them. pip played for them all and loved it; pip played for them and loved every ounce of myself while i did and things were _ good _ , there were good things until _ it _ happened. until he drowned and they found me instead.

when they found me then i couldn’t breathe. 

iii.

the coffin isn’t mine. well. it wasn’t always mine. it still looks like its old owner. brown. strong. solid. markings all over. it still has a harpoon iron in it. sometimes i hold it close and i can hear pip’s tambourine play and i forget i am supposed to have drowned.

i wonder if he found pip. wherever he is now. i wonder if he found his storyteller. 

i hope they all found each other. 

iv.

i am alone now. i didn’t used to be, i think. but i am now—they don’t bother with me much anymore. nobody knows what to do with a lost black boy and they won’t help me find him so i am left alone. 

but i wasn’t alone before—before. i had a friend. he was good to me. he was _ good _ even after _ it _ happened. they all left me but him and i clung to him till the last. i said i would not abandon him and he said he would not abandon me and i believed him—i believed him with his voice thick and full and so unlike the paper-thin ones i knew. listen, he told me, and you will often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that i am there. 

so i listened. i listened to his voice when he was near and the tap-thud of his leg when he wasn’t and i knew that he was there. i knew that he had not abandoned me. 

but i think he was lost too. i think there was something burning inside him, the same thing that drowned pip alive, the same thing i remember when i forget to breathe. i remember that thing eating away at him and taking him away from me and i could see him fighting and fighting it but it kept taking him anyway. i remember his hands. leathery and rough. i remember his eyes like a storm and the whale he was after and the coffin he built for himself. i remember listening for that tap-thud on the last day, two days, three days, but never hearing it. waiting. i did not know where he was. 

i remember clinging to him. begging him to stay.

and then he left me too.

or maybe it was the other way around. 

maybe if i had found him before. maybe if he had found me before. 

maybe pip wouldn’t be so lost.


End file.
